Tara Skurtu (poetry ’13) continues to be one of our most prolific alumni. In addition to a Fulbright and a poem recently published on the T, Tara’s poem “Night Communion” will appear in the July issue of Plume online, “Long Poem, Bucharest” is in the spring issue of Poetry Wales, and her poems “Desire” and “Limit” appear in the newest issue of Redivider.

Tara notes that this recent work was inspired by her time in Romania, where she traveled as a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow.

Congratulations, Tara!

Tara Skurtu teaches incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program. She is the recipient of a 2015-16 Fulbright, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and two Academy of American Poets prizes. Tara’s poems have been translated into Romanian and Hungarian, and her recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Plume, Memorious, DMQ Review, The Common, and Tahoma Literary Review.

We’re so proud to announce that current MFA candidate Jillian Jackson has received a prestigious St. Botolph’s Club Foundation (SBCF) Emerging Artist Grant! SBCF is dedicated to promoting artistic and cultural enterprises of New Englanders through generous grants for artists “to whom it can make a difference through the combination of financial support, recognition, and endorsement.” Some of the Creative Writing Program’s former St. Botolph grant recipients include poet Duy Doan and fiction writers Kimberly Elkins, Mai Wang, and Emma Duffy-Comparone. We’re so pleased to add Jillian to this great list.

Congratulations, Jill! We’re excited to read your work soon.

Jillian Jackson is an MFA Fiction candidate at Boston University. She has a degree in literature from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and she’s interned for many Boston area publishers, including David R. Godine, Shambhala Publications, and Candlewick Press. She’s the recipient of Boston University’s Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award. She lives in Allston, MA.

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/crwr/2015/06/19/jillian-jackson-awarded-st-botolph-grant/feed/2The MFA in Creative Writing: For Those Who Need to Writehttp://blogs.bu.edu/crwr/2015/02/18/the-mfa-in-creative-writing-for-those-who-need-to-write/
http://blogs.bu.edu/crwr/2015/02/18/the-mfa-in-creative-writing-for-those-who-need-to-write/#commentsWed, 18 Feb 2015 20:30:06 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/crwr/?p=1800This is a guest post by Michael Samuels (fiction 2015), who interviewed CW Program Director Karl Kirchwey for his take on the Creative Writing MFA.

Michael Samuels

For Karl Kirchwey, prize-winning poet, translator, and director of creative writing at BU, existential questions surround the school’s prestigious Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. The top-ranked program, whose alumni include Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Elizabeth Alexander, and Rafael Campo, is not for the faint of heart. “What are you in fact preparing your students to do?” he sometimes asks himself. “Well, you’re preparing them to starve, right? Especially if they’re poets!”

That’s a joke, mostly, although Kirchwey is humble with the promises of an MFA: there’s no guarantee that the degree will make you a great writer. “That’s a question of how you were born,” he says, “what’s happened to you that might make writing an urgent necessity for you, what might have happened to you that has unfit you for any other activity in life.”

“There are writers who manage to actually combine careers,” Kirchwey clarifies, citing the “physician poet” Rafael Campo as the prime example. Since few people make a living from writing fiction or poetry alone, most former students of the program become teachers in the US and abroad, local journalists and foreign correspondents, translators, editors, founders and coordinators of publications and literary organizations – careers enriched by a creative writing background, and with time carved out for their own fiction and poetry.

In any case, for those who believe they have the skill and devotion, “identifying your own gift and identifying your desire to focus on that gift is something which can be respected,” Kirchwey says, “and which can be built on.” The program offers “more time for your own work, more time for reading, more time for making connections with other writers, more time for learning how to teach,” he explains. The Global Fellowship, unique to the program, also provides more time to write, an adventure to write about, and sometimes the international connection that leads to a post-graduation job abroad.

Before traveling the world, Kirchwey says it’s also extremely valuable that students find their place in the cultural universe. “Just as scientific progress is completely impossible without an acceptance and an understanding of the work that has come before,” Kirchwey explains, “our progress as artists but also as human beings is completely impossible without an understanding of the literature, the art, the music that has come before.”

Writing, says Kirchwey, means joining that stream. “It is not to avoid responsibility, it is not to live as an irresponsible artist, but it is instead to take the highest kind of responsibility.”

Michael Samuels is a current Fiction MFA candidate, and writes for the Office of Communications at Boston University College of Arts & Sciences.

Thank you, Michael!

If you are a BU MFA student or alumnus and wish to write a post for this blog, please contact Catherine Con at crwr@bu.edu.

We were delighted to see that the latest poetry collection by Erin Belieu, Slant Six(Copper Canyon Press),was reviewed on the first page of the Arts section of the New York Times! Times critic Dwight Gardner was largely favorable in his review, saying, “It’s got more smoke, more confidence, more wit and less tolerance for obscurity. Her crisp free verse has as many subcurrents as a magnetic field.”

This was the last week of classes here at BU, and we had our last Black Box Reading of the semester on Tuesday, and went to an AGNI party (with readings) on Thursday. We’re looking forward to even more program parties over the weekend, and wish you all the very best of luck in your final papers and exams!

We’re excited to see this article about Karl Kirchwey in BU Today! In addition to being the director of the Creative Writing Program, Karl is an award-winning poet, scholar, translator, arts curator, and teacher of poetry. His work inquires deeply into a vast array of disparate subjects, including physics, biology, Roman history, religion, and mythology–to name just a few. On Karl, Robert Pinsky says, “In a period when some American poets have been concerned either with the problematic nature of language on one side, or the nuances of individual psychology on the other, the presence of historical reality in Kirchwey’s work is to be honored.”

We’re grateful to have Karl as both our program director and professor of one of the graduate-level poetry workshops. On teaching, Karl says, “For me, the opportunity to talk about poems in the company of other people who care about poetry is huge—it’s a huge privilege and an opportunity.”

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/crwr/2014/10/20/creative-writing-program-director-karl-kirchwey-featured-in-bu-today/feed/0Mai Wang Receives Emerging Artists Awardhttp://blogs.bu.edu/crwr/2014/06/09/mai-wang-receives-emerging-artists-award/
http://blogs.bu.edu/crwr/2014/06/09/mai-wang-receives-emerging-artists-award/#commentsMon, 09 Jun 2014 19:07:51 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/crwr/?p=1374Hearty congratulations to Mai Wang! A current MFA candidate in fiction, Mai recently received an Emerging Artists Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. The St. Botolph club gives grants to exceptional writers, visual artists, and musicians who are beginning their careers.

We’re so proud of you, Mai!

Mai Wang graduated from Yale University, where she was an English major in the Writing Concentration. A former beauty blogger, she has written for print and digital publications such as Upstreet Magazine, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Yahoo Shine. In 2013, she was the Writer-in-Residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City, NE. In her writing, she explores themes of immigration and national identity. She is currently working on a novel set in Beijing that is based on her mother’s experience in the Cultural Revolution.

Susan Barba is the managing editor at David R. Godine, Publisher/Black Sparrow Books. She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University, and her writing has appeared in Boston Review, Words Without Borders, and The Yalobusha Review. She has a poem forthcoming in the Hudson Review, and she lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children.

Mike Brokos hails from the mid-Atlantic, growing up outside of Baltimore, earning an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Maryland, and living in the Washington, DC area for several years before coming to Boston to work on his MFA in Poetry.

Bryan Coller grew up in Southern California where he attended UC Irvine. He studies and teaches creative writing at Boston University.

Laura Goldstein is from Niceville, Florida. She finished a creative writing M.A. in August from the University of Southern Mississippi, and is now pursuing her M.F.A in poetry from Boston University.

Natasha Hakimi holds both a B.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of California, Los Angeles.She has received several awards for creative writing, including the May Merrill Miller Award for Poetry in 2008 and 2010, the Ruth Brill Award for short fiction in 2010 and the Falling Leaves Award in 2010. Natasha writes for Los Angeles Magazine and Truthdig and is pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in Poetry at Boston University.

Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English Literature at UC Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books 2011) and has two forthcoming chapbooks, Organ Speech (Corrupt Press, November 2011) and Some Citrus Makes me Blue (Dancing Girl Press, January 2012). She has also been published in Upstairs at Duroc and Media Fields: Science and Scale.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Abriana Jette holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and English from Hofstra University. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Boston University where she is a Betsey Leonard Fellow. She is a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, an AWP Intro Journal Project nominee, and teaches at the Boston Academy of Arts.

Kelly Morse grew up in the Pacific Northwest, but has since drifted as far as Spain, South Africa and even the East Coast. Most recently, her work has appeared in PoetsArtists and Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi. Kelly is currently working on a series that explores linguistic and world-view gaps between Eastern and Western cultures after a two-year stay in Vietnam.

Formatting the Thesis: The Graduate School has provided a detailed and specific guide to assist you in formatting your thesis. Go pick one up at room 112 and study it. You will need to meet with Martha Khan to have your formatting checked and corrected. Before you meet with her, it is a good idea to have the following pages formatted:
1. your title page
2. the approval page
3. your table of contents
4. and two or three pages from the body of your thesis

This last item is simply to give Martha Khan an idea of what the finished body text of your thesis will look like. She is not at any point in this process interested in the content of the thesis, but only in making sure that you adhere to the strict formatting guidelines set forth by the Graduate School.

Likely you will be required to revise your formatting. Don’t worry, it’s almost impossible to get right on the first try. If you find that you are asked to make revisions, make sure you meet with Martha again, before you turn in your final draft.

Content of the Thesis: This has been mentioned already in the Studentguide, but it’s important enough that it bears mentioning again. Your thesis must consist of work you have written for your workshops at BU. Stories you’ve written while here, but which you have not been reviewed in class are not acceptable. You may continue to add new material to your novella, as long as the core structure of the whole remains the same.

Your thesis will consist of a Title Page, Copyright Page (optional), Approval Page, Acknowledgements (also optional), Table of Contents, and a number of stories, a novella, or part or all of a novel. You are not required to include an abstract in the thesis.

Length of the Thesis: Your thesis must be at least 90 pages long for fiction, 35 for poetry, and roughly 80 pages for playwriting.

The Approval Procedure: Both of your readers will need to sign your approval pages. It’s probably a good idea to print your thesis out on regular paper when handing it to your readers. Make sure you print out four copies of your approval page (just in case some get destroyed, rained on, or if you’d like to keep a few as souvenirs) on good paper for your readers to sign. Thesis review is a pass/fail process, i.e. if your readers are not willing to sign it, or if they demand significant revisions, you will need to revise and resubmit for the next available graduation date.

The Approval Page: Just to make sure everyone gets the names, academic titles, and degrees right, here’s the pertinent information for our main faculty members.

In Fiction:
Leslie Epstein, D.F.A.
Professor of English [not reading in 2009]

Rosanna Warren, M.A.
Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities,
University Professor and Professor of English and
Modern Foreign Languages [not reading in 2009]

In Playwriting:
Kate Snodgrass, M.A.
Artistic Director

Melinda Lopez, M.A.
Adjunct Assistant Professor (of Creative Writing)

Ronan Noone, M.A.
Adjunct Assistant Professor (of Creative Writing)

Richard Schotter
Lecturer (in Creative Writing)

NOTE: The punctuation of academic degrees follows the form set forth by The Chicago Manual of Style (14th Edition). Chicago Style notes that degrees may be listed without punctuation, (MFA, DFA, PhD etc.), however, no matter which form you use, make sure to be consistent.

Caballo sat on the bus near me,
Unmoving and self-contained as a cactus.
His moustache handlebarred over his lips,
His potbelly pigged out over his nickel belt buckle.
Like a Navajo Coyote his heart was hidden deep away
And he breathed in short, phlegmatic gasps—
Still choking on the desert’s bloody sand.

If Caballo and his brothers had known they’d be so good at burying wives
They might never have started
Instead, he watched his fourth set down in the clay,
A tall and frail girl with the bones of a Spanish princess
And a flickering blue flame under her breast
That was so easily snuffed out
In his woodworked hands.

Keep on moving, Caballo. Keep on moving, Caballo.

Caballo did not sleep
As the land swept from prairie to swamp.
His straw hat sat balanced on his lap,
Its yellow tarred in spots from putting on and taking off.
At a rest stop I watched him remove his boots and wiggle his socks
Then pour the brown liquid of a silver flask into the dead shrubbery.
His drinking days were done; and no more wives.

Keep on moving, Caballo.
****
Chops hopped on the bus, all young and ugly
From some place called Jackson, Tennessee.
He sat in the back and talked to no one in particular
But at great length and impressive volume.
His teeth were bad but his words rapped like steel in velvet,
Like his hero Muhammad Ali—
But Ali should be every boy’s hero, if he’s got fire in his heart.

Chops told me that a woman would be the death of him,
But not if he could help it.
His mother was a bitch, and his grandmother was a bitch–
So what if they birthed him! What the hell had they done for him lately?
I nodded, being afraid not to.
I looked like a man who would understand, he told me.
New York City is the only place to live.

Chops don’t stop for nothing. Chops don’t stop for nothing.

At the next station Chops shoved his way past
A slow-moving Mexican whose real name I didn’t know.
He said someone might be looking for him in this town,
And when it was our time to leave he wasn’t in his seat.
Chops needs space, goddamn it! to float and to sting.
To gloat and to sing.
On a boat named “King.”

Chops don’t stop for nothing.

We the three of us thought them other people were the problem. Hell, how was we to know different?

William Fancher is an MFA candidate in the graduate Playwriting Program at Boston University. This poem was originally performed as a song at the Boston Theatre Marathon in April of 2009.